top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Canadian Authors
"We have to stress our conservative credentials and emphasize that we are the natural, national alternative to the Liberals. Clearly the Alliance has shown it can't break out of its Western box. The Alliance is at single-digit support in three quarters of the country."
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
"You know for sure Jane would be annoyed she gave you all her money and you're not even enjoying it. Should have given it to me.' Myrna had shaken her head in mock bewilderment. 'I'd have known what to do with it. Boom, down to Jamaica, a nice Rasta man, a good book-''Wait a minute. You have a Rasta man and you're reading a book?''Oh, yes. Each has a purpose. For instance, a Rasta man is great when he's hard, but not a book.'Clara had laughed. They shared a disdain for hard books. Not the content, but the cover. Hardcovers were simply too hard to hold, especially in bed.'Unlike a Rasta man,' said Myrna."
"I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me."
"There are two kinds of people; those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievement from the second."
"Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper."
"We live in the same city but don't see the same things - you see buildings and I see memories..."
"Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows."
"I ought to grow up successfully, and I'm sure it will be my own fault if I don't. I feel it's a great responsibility because I have only one chance. If I don't grow up right I can't go back and begin over again."
"Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet."
"Even when I'm alone I have real good company - dreams and imaginations and pretendings. I like to be alone now and then, just to think over things and taste them. But I love friendships - and nice, jolly little times with people."
"Writers, like priests, should have compassion...and a sensitivity to pain..."
"My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind."
"By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu."
"Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term."
"Most young men are such bores. They haven't lived long enough to learn that they are not the wonders to the world they are to their mothers."
"The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with."
"Asshole Proximity Disorder."
"In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?"
"But that quickly faded, and he frowned. "You're bleeding," he said. "What happened?"Claire sighed and held up her wrist to show him the bandage. "Man, you would be so embarrassed if I said it was something else." Michael looked blank. "I'm a girl, Michael, it could have been all natural, you know. Tampons?"
"When people oppose your view, you can become a lightning rod, but if I were you, I'd let them stew..."
"We don't know where we're going, but isn't is fun to go?"
"Did you talk to him about it?""Oh, sure. Nothing happened, yadda yadda. The usual. But my maydar went off like crazy.""Maydar?""As in, he may be thinking about super hot sex with her. Like radar, only not as sure."
"Open the access to your heart and write down what your voice is whispering..."
"Consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ..."
"Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket."
"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June."
"Meditate, Clear, Calm, Center, Ground, Empty your mind, Stillness. Be receptive to a new approach. Believe in the possibilities of new opportunities."
"Gilbert, I'm afraid I'm scandalously in love with you."
"My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries."
"If you can HELP someone, DO IT! The world NEEDS more of THAT!"
"Most people like mirrors; what they do not like, is people, who are mirrors."
"Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist."
"This is about me being ready to succeed.When I win in my mind, I truly win.Anything worthwhile deserves some time.I will do it this time! No excuses!"
"Managing excuses means not excusing yourself from the responsibility you need to take with your thought, words, and actions."
bottom of page